Powers of the Press

Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England

Aled Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351909464
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The power of the popular press presents all modern societies with difficulties. It is, however, a problem with a history: the hold of the press over public opinion was debated with urgency throughout the 19th century. This book looks at the ways in which individuals, pressure groups, political organisations and the state sought to understand the mass communications media of the 19th century, and use them to influence public opinion and effect moral and social reform. Aled Jones addresses the problem by using three approaches: first he considers the 19th century theories of the influence of communications media on patterns of social thought and behaviour; then he examines attitudes towards the press in both high and popular culture; finally he explores the social and intellectual world of the reader, the consumer both of the press as a commodity and of the hidden moral strategies that were built into it. The tensions between Victorian moral imperatives and the operation of the free commercial market raised issues of great public concern, such as whether the mass media should be under private or public control. These tensions have dominated the way in which Britain and other western societies have thought about the newer broadcasting media, but their origins are older and more complex than studies of contemporary media acknowledge.

Chapter One
The liberty of the press

The press has been, for the most part, the unwilling slave of error, and the instruments of kings, priests, aristocrats, and imbeciles, in carrying out their irrational, ambitious, uncivilised, and uncivilising designs.

The Compositors' Chronicle, 1 Oct. 1842, p. 213.

The expansion of the press, as part of the process which Raymond Williams identified as the cultural 'long revolution', was not universally agreed to be one of its natural or legal liberties. The liberty of the press had been contested territory since the sixteenth century, and the meaning of press freedom specifically as applied to newspapers was an issue of particular concern to government, printers, journalists and sections of the reading public. The first attempt to use legislation to define news as a taxable commodity was made in 1819, and was further amended by Act of Parliament in 1836, both pieces of legislation, coincidentally, being framed during periods of severe social and political unrest. This chapter considers a range of critical responses to the changing framework of state regulation of the newspaper press by focusing on two aspects of the problem of press freedom as they were manifested before and during the nineteenth century. First, it is important to recall that the struggle waged against restrictive legislation in the first half of the nineteenth century was rooted in much older traditions, and definitions, of press freedom, whose vocabulary and terms of reference were carried over into the language of politics and newspaper journalism after 1815. Secondly, a necessarily abbreviated outline of the development of such concepts of press freedom will provide the background for an account of the emergence of a new regulatory framework, and a fresh political policy, that culminated in the repeal of the Advertisement Duty in 1853, the Stamp Duty in 1855 and the Paper Duty in 1861.

Inherited narratives

The identification of a free press with just government, and of censorship with tyranny, has, since the sixteenth century, lain close to the core of political thinking in England as elsewhere. The Leveller petition to Parliament of September 1648, submitted in protest against Lord Fairfax's Warrant for suppressing unlicensed books and pamphlets, characteristically expressed what would become the widely held view that such restrictions on the press would 'usher in a tyrannie; mens mouths being to be kept from making noise, whilst they are robd of their liberties'. The suppression of information under the monarchy, which had deliberately kept the people ignorant of the 'truth', was 'fitted only to serve the unjust ends of Tyrants and Oppressers, whereby the Nation was enslaved . . . '.¹ During the Restoration, Charles Blount's Reasons humbly offered for the liberty of unlicensed printing of 1693 signalled the continuation of the agitation that led to the Press Licensing Act, and with it the imprimatur, the license to print, being allowed to lapse in 1695.² A century later, the liberty of the press, closely linked to the issues of the freedom of speech and of association, remained the subject of urgent public debate. The ban on the reporting of parliamentary affairs was successfully defied by journalists in 1771, and the activities of such metropolitan groups as The Friends of the Freedom of the Press maintained the impetus for further change during the dangerous years of the French Wars.³ Outside London, too, the issue was held to be an important one, and a meeting of artisans in Warrington in November 1792, for example, drew up a ten-point reform programme that extolled the value of good morals and citizenship, and which demanded that 'the liberty of the press ought to be held involable (sic) in all nations'.⁴ But the close association between newspapers and government, established principally through the granting of state subsidies to favoured titles, continued to disturb the advocates of a free press. William Godwin in November 1795 considered that the attacks made upon him and other 'republicans and levellers' by the 'treasury prints', most notoriously the Sun and the True Briton, founded in October 1792 with the support of George Rose, Secretary to the Treasury, amounted to a form of Crown prosecution.⁵ The press, which Godwin described as 'that great engine for raising men to the dignity of gods'⁶ was also, as he knew to his cost, a mechanism of repression. Tom Paine agreed. Writing in the American Citizen in October 1806, Paine warned that in America the concept of the liberty of the press had been grievously misunderstood. It was, in Paine's corrective, emphatically not a slogan which sought special privileges for printers. Rather, it referred to a specific historical moment, the removal in 169.5 of the imprimatur from British law, which established for printing freedom from prior restraint. For Paine, it was the public, not printers or journalists, who were to be the judges of whether or not the content of a periodical was socially acceptable.⁷ Print for him was essentially a publicly accessible and accountable medium of communication, not a tool under the monopolistic control of government, journalists or printers.

The connection between the freedom of the press and civil liberty, established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had by the turn of the nineteenth century become a firmly rooted tradition in English political culture. The producers of cheap newspapers, whether they regarded themselves primarily as forces of radical opposition, or as pioneers of a new commercial medium, or both, not unjustly regarded themselves as the most direct heirs to that tradition. The Sunday Times, for example, carried beneath its title a masthead that crystallised the belief that 'The LIBERTY OF THE PRESS is the PALLADIUM of all the Civil, Political and RELIGIOUS RIGHTS of an ENGLISHMAN'.⁸ It would be a mistake to dismiss such remarks purely as expressions of pious self-regard on the part of journalists and printers. The theory that a press free from direct state control was the foundation on which constitutional rights were based, and from which stemmed the associated and much abused notion of the 'fourth estate', was a powerful organising principle, to which a history of conflict between journalists and the legislature had provided added impetus. In particular, the prosecution of John Wilkes following the publication of the forty fifth number of the North Briton on 23 April 1763, and the trials of Robert Hardy and Home Tooke in 1794, of William Cobbett and Henry Hunt in the years between 1804 and 1811, and of Watson and Hone in 1817, retained a powerful legitimating role within journalism throughout the nineteenth century.⁹ However, two landmark judgements in the courts helped reverse this process. In 1829, the Duke of Wellington failed to prosecute the Morning Journal for libel following the paper's attacks upon him for consenting to Catholic Emancipation. Although the King was found to have been libelled, the jury recommended leniency amidst strong cross-party disapproval of Wellington's action.¹⁰ Two years later, Cobbett was similarly acquitted of a libel charge against government ministers, and was instead prosecuted on the lesser offence of incitement. As a result of these judgements, Erskine May argued that the freedom of the press in Britain had been assured, and that journalists had won the 'utmost latitude of criticism and invective' in their treatment of public figures and political affairs.¹¹ Demands for press freedom, however, did not end there, and the continuation of what were regarded to be forms of prior restraint imposed by taxation rather than by prosecutions for libel fuelled much of the campaign for a free newspaper press after 1831.

But the inherited narrative of press freedom, which had been largely responsible for propelling so many early nineteenth-century newspaper publishers onto a collision course with the law, was not simply accepted as an indisputable truth. It was also interpreted, elaborated upon, refashioned, even rejected by nineteenth-century journalists and critics. The role of printers in the production of newspapers was a case in point. Edward Baines, founder of the Leeds Mercury, fully understood the duality of his trade when in circa 1820 he defined newspaper journalism as a mechanical industry tied to a moral purpose. For the joint sway of 'Chaos & old Night' to be ended, Baines argued, it was not only state interference that needed to be challenged. All those who opposed mechanical improvements in newspaper publishing were also guilty of '[daring] to limit knowledge to the classes which at present enjoy it'.¹² The power of printers, as well as that of governments, increasingly came to be regarded by journalists as a danger to press freedom. The growth of printers' trade unions, which were charged with being 'as violently opposed to any change as the most conservative of landowners were to the repeal of the Corn Laws',¹³ was a cause of particular concern. When John Walter introduced steam machinery into the print offices of The Times on 29 November 1814, he did so secretly and under cover of darkness, thus ensuring a fait accompli to which the printers were reluctantly obliged to submit. But elsewhere, the autonomy of printers as a skilled and self-regulating segment of the labour market was not to be so easily undermined. The world of the early nineteenth-century printer, working a trade dominated by the tramping artisan, was necessarily close and interdependent.¹⁴ In 1842, for example, the Bristol Gazette chapel of the Bristol Typographical Society voted to ban the use of anti-Semitic language at the workplace following a complaint made by one of its members.¹⁵ Such instances of internal discipline and solidarity helped printers to survive the restructuring of the industry that followed the introduction of Applegarth's cylinder machine, exhibited as state-of-the-art printing technology at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the new Hoe machine that followed it, which increased production from 5,000 to 20,000 copies per hour with fewer compositors, and further developments in reproducible metal facsimile stereotyping.¹⁶ Printers also established for themselves an effective lobbying system, principally in the 1840s and 1850s by means of such publications as the Compositors' Chronicle, the Typographical Gazette and the Typographical Circular. These represented printers as a group that had developed its own discourses of press freedom. In an article praising the 'moral engine' of the printing press, which they alone were able to drive, a printer attributed the outbreak of the French revolution of 1830 to 'the forcible entry of the police into the printing-offices, the presses in which they rendered unfit for use'. Any actions that interfered with the liberty of the printers to use their presses in their own ways, the Compositors' Chronicle warned in 1842, could lead to similar scenes of 'bloodshed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Nineteenth Century General Editors' Preface
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The liberty of the press
• 2 The newspaper imagined
• 3 Imposing order: historians and indexers
• 4 The voice of the charmer
• 5 The cultural debate
• 6 The political debate
• 7 Journalism and public discussion
• Appendix
• Selected Bibliography
• Index